Monday, September 29, 2008

When does the stupidity end? The Republicans have kept Palin under protective bubble wrap, briefly let her out and she is clearly out of her depth in an interview by Katie Couric (see below), truth be told not only couldn't she answer the questions with out stumbling but she obviously didn't understand the questions. Back under bubble wrap. Quite clearly she is a hockey mom and that's where she belongs, not running for vice president.

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As of this publicationt the house voted not to support the bail out. The Republican right media are wringing their hands and blaming the democrats, look at the numbers.It is time to freeze the increase in mortgage rates that are causing the foreclosures and stop the bleeding. If this is not done then it won't be 700 billion it might be 2 or 3 trillion dollars. It comes down to greed on behalf of the commercial banks and wall street. The people of America do not need to bail out these banks. Yes NoDemocrats 140 95Republicans 65 133Total 205 228Media Note* Fox News twists the truth.McCain the champion of deregulation did not deliver the goods that he suspended his campaign for. He has come a long way from the maverick of 2000 who was my political hero. The straight talk express has long since been derailed. He has become an anachronism. If McCain wins this election it won't be because of Palin, everyone is painfully aware of her intellectual short comings except the diehard Republican extreme right, it will be because of race. A black man running against a white man. Most fence sitters are there because of race. Sad to say but when they close that curtain in the voting booth they will vote skin color.America should have gotten past this but I have my doubts. The working class, the guy who works at two jobs to make ends meet, and looks forward to his weekend. Who worries about making his car payment, who worries about getting his kids through college and worries how to pay the mortgage, he may just vote Republican, because of race. Never mind that he has been screwed by the system and the fat cats on wall street are being considered for a 700 billion dollar bail out for their bad decisions. No one bails him out if he can't pay for his kids tuition, or his mortgage. Gas prices are killing him and he's worried about the price of heating his house this winter. But no one talks about him except the democrats but hell it's a black guy, got to vote for the white guy. It is time to get over it America.-John Mullin

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The Palin Problem.BY KATHLEEN PARKER"...Palin’s recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League.No one hates saying that more than I do. Like so many women, I’ve been pulling for Palin, wishing her the best, hoping she will perform brilliantly. I’ve also noticed that I watch her interviews with the held breath of an anxious parent, my finger poised over the mute button in case it gets too painful. Unfortunately, it often does. My cringe reflex is exhausted.Palin filibusters. She repeats words, filling space with deadwood. Cut the verbiage and there’s not much content there. Here’s but one example of many from her interview with Hannity: “Well, there is a danger in allowing some obsessive partisanship to get into the issue that we’re talking about today. And that’s something that John McCain, too, his track record, proving that he can work both sides of the aisle, he can surpass the partisanship that must be surpassed to deal with an issue like this...”NationalReviewOnLine

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CBS News' Katie Couric Palin interview. Clearly Palin is out of her depth, she hasn't a clue. This is painful to watch but it is for real.

********This is unbelievable. Palin is an incompetent. It has to be heard to be believed.

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Has the McCain Campaign Broken Sarah Palin? "...When I compare Palin's performance with Gibson to her performance with Couric, the biggest difference I see is confidence. With Gibson, she obviously lacked the knowledge one expects at this level, but she seemed to have a glib faith that she could bluff her way through. She may not have answered many of his questions directly, but her evasions were, for the most part, perfectly articulate and comprehensible. In the Couric interviews, by contrast, she often seemed to be stringing along buzz words and sentence fragments that even she recognized to be gibberish. With Gibson, she was tap dancing; with Couric she was drowning."...-The Plank, The New Republic

Fox News is not news, but propaganda and a danger to our Democracy and our freedoms. Free press, justice and democracy; Legendary journalist Bill Moyers address the National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis, June 7, 2008. If you disagree with everything on this blog listen to Bill Moyers honestly and fairly and then tell me if you disagree.

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Recommended Book;

The bestselling author reveals how the U.S. financial sector has hijacked our economy and put America’s global future at riskIn American Theocracy, Kevin Phillips warned us of the perilous interaction of debt, financial recklessness, and the increasing cost of scarce oil. The current housing and mortgage debacle is proof once more of Phillips’s prescience, and only the first harbinger of a national crisis. In Bad Money, Phillips describes the consequences of our misguided economic policies, our mounting debt, our collapsing housing market, our threatened oil, and the end of American domination of world markets. America’s current challenges (and failures) run striking parallels to the decline of previous leading world economic powers—especially the Dutch and British. Global overreach, worn-out politics, excessive debt, and exhausted energy regimes are all chilling signals that the United States is crumbling as the world superpower.

“Bad money” refers to a new phenomenon in wayward megafinance—the emergence of a U.S. economy that is globally dependent and dominated by hubris-driven financial services. Also “bad” are the risk miscalculations and strategic abuses of new multitrillion-dollar products such as asset-backed securities and the lure of buccaneering vehicles like hedge funds. Finally, the U.S. dollar has been turned into bad money as it has weakened and become vulnerable to the world’s other currencies. In all these ways, “bad” finance has failed the American people and pointed U.S. capitalism toward a global crisis. Bad Money is the perfect follow- up to Phillips’s last book, whose dire warnings are now proving frighteningly accurate.

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The Pornography of Power:"How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened AmericaTHE PORNOGRAPHY OF POWER serves as an update to the World War I-era book WAR IS A RACKET. The former expands on the latter's theme of money, not security, as the reason for both military action and peacetime armed forces spending. (You can read WAR IS A RACKET for free on-line with a web search of the title.)A sensible response to box cutters and poorly-constructed cockpit doors should cost taxpayers less than billions of dollars for F-22 Raptor fighter planes. Yet as THE PORNOGRAPHY OF POWER details, the Bush Administration and Congress used the September 11, 2001, hijackings as an excuse to place orders for those and many other expensive, unnecessary killing machines beneath the Christmas trees of their weapons manufacturer campaign contributors.Oh, and don't forget jobs. As if it were a contest to see if people will accept the stupidest rationale for spending tax dollars on overpriced, needless weapons, public officials cite jobs, THE PORNOGRAPHY OF POWER recounts. Imagine the community improvement were the government to use all that money on hospitals, schools or infrastructure instead of superfluous military stuff - while creating as many and probably a lot more paychecks. Perhaps school children should lobby Congress.Nearly 100 years since World War I, war still proves the greatest racket. Read THE PORNOGRAPHY OF POWER."- Jim L. LaRegina

"I’ve been covering John McCain steadily for a decade. A few years ago, I worked on a book, which I foolishly never completed, on the U.S. Senate with McCain as the central character. So when I step back and think of McCain, even in the heat of this campaign, I still think of him first in the real world of governing, not in the show-business world of the election.I think first of the personal qualities. He was an unfailingly candid man. When other politicians described a meeting, they always ended up the heroes of the story. But McCain would always describe the meeting straight, emphasizing his own failings with more vigor than his accomplishments.He is, for a politician, a humble man. The most important legacy of his prisoner-of-war days is that he witnessed others behaving more heroically than he did. This experience has given him a basic honesty when appraising himself..."-DAVID BROOKS

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SCIENCE AND THE ENVIRONMENT

The illness in Planet Earth"Planet Earth is unwell, argues James Lovelock in The Green Room. Emissions of greenhouse gases and other environmental changes have, he says, brought humanity and the natural world to the edge of crisis.Climate change alarms me, and it should alarm anyoneSend us your commentsThe Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, published in 2001, is one of the scariest documents you will ever read.It talks about changes to the Earth by the end of this century which will be as great or greater than occurred between the end of the last Ice Age and the time when humans started changing the atmosphere; it is huge.It alarms me, and it should alarm anyone. "-James Lovelock

Europe Is Getting Warmer Faster, Report Says"Europe, it seems, may be more vulnerable to climate change than some people think.According to a report issued Monday by the European Environment Agency, the World Health Organization and the European Commission, Europe has warmed more than the global average. The report also includes new projections that suggest European seas are set to rise more than previous estimates by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."-James Kanter

Background

I earned my BA Degree at Queens College CUNY, in Political Science, and MA from College of Staten Island CUNY, in Liberal Studies. PhM in Metaphysics, studying the Egyptian Mystery school and its effect on western thinking. My other interest are masonic history, western civilization, specifically ancient Rome through the renaissance. My other pursuit is Shotokan Karate, an interest that has consumed beginning in 1960. I hold a 8 degree black belt in Shotokan Karate from the World Traditional Karate Organization, WTKO. www.wtko.org I hold a 3rd degree in Iaido, Japanese sword art including a variety of martial arts weapons and close combat techniques.